Should we showcase accessible apps, shame unaccessible ones, or do both?
Opened this issue · 12 comments
To me, the goal of this project is allow people to choose accessible tools over unaccessible ones when an accessible options exists. Hence the focus should be on showcasing the accessible tools. We could always mentioned the other tools that have been reviewed and deemed less accessible, but we shouldn't put them front and center.
Sadly, the bulk of tools have accessibility problems. To gloss over that fact does nobody any good. In particular, a disabled user whose employer / client / whatever wants to standardize on these tools may need the feedback that can be offered here in order to offer an informed push back against an inaccessible tool being used. This also counts for understanding how it is inaccessible.
So the goal of this project is not about shaming. But it can be about arming those who most need the information. The linked references themselves may be shaming, but the material here should not have that as a goal.
Maybe this is a terrible comparison, but this project increasingly makes me think of The Wire Cutter—this site that tests a bunch of things (e.g. folks guitars, printers for a home office, or drones for children) and tells you which one you should buy.
I'm wondering if we should progressively move to a model like this.
On the front page we'd have link to each of the categories we have right now, with perhaps the category winner if there is one on the main page. Then the category page would showcase that same winner at the top, then go into all of the technical details of why it was picked over the others.
Thoughts?
I think The Wirecutter model is a good model. If we can get there, great, but two caveats:
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We will not be able to go into the detail they go into; I get paid good money to do that as my job and I am not giving it away for free (nor are others in my industry).
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We need to have a certain critical mass of reviews and feedback to pull that off.
One the one hand I think it would best to showcase great accessible apps (like https://appsco.pe/ is doing for PWAs), on the other hand it is also really helpful to show popular apps that are unaccessible and why they are unaccessible so people know about this issues when recommending an app.
So maybe have pages for each category (eg. Online Surveys) and on each category page all reviewed apps would be shown with a rating from best to worst.
As @aardrian points out, testing and reviewing an app takes a lot of time, so not sure what's the best way to get high-quality reviews. Also rating is always very hard, so maybe start with "accessible", "somehow accessible" and "unaccessible" and use more nuanced ratings later.
@aardrian wrote:
We will not be able to go into the detail they go into; I get paid good money to do that as my job and I am not giving it away for free (nor are others in my industry).
Oh, absolutely. That's really not the goal. You want to follow the 20/80 rule, here: do the 20% work that helps 80% make a decision.
@justmarkup wrote:
Also rating is always very hard, so maybe start with "accessible", "somehow accessible" and "unaccessible" and use more nuanced ratings later.
Yes. It could be specific to each app, too. For example, my understanding is Doodle is accessible to participate in a poll, but not to create one.
Suggest adopting a neutral position. The AppleVis website contains reviews of the accessibility of iOS/MacOS apps, and the reviews are an objective assessment (sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes in between). As a consumer, I find that incredibly useful.
Very selfishly, the questions I’m trying to answer are of two kinds:
- I’m using app Foo. Is it accessible? If not, what competing solution is?
- I need a project management app. Which ones are accessible?
What you have just outlined is exactly the kind of work I do. I will help a client evaluate platforms and services. But I bill for that. It is how I feed my family.
As such, those who may be best positioned to answer your questions may be uninterested in taking food off their own table.
Mostly I am hoping people can at least log their experiences. That alone will be dramatically better than what we have (which is nothing). It also means what we get is what we get. Asking for specifics is awesome, but at some level I expect enterprise-level applications to appear here rarely if ever.
@tobie , those are the same questions I want to answer when I go to AppleVis. I either look to see if there is a review of the app I would like to use, or look at the app categories to find apps that are accessible/have reviewed well for accessibility, if I don't already have one in mind.
We will not be able to go into the detail they go into; I get paid good money to do that as my job and I am not giving it away for free (nor are others in my industry).
With the accessibility regulations in place now in the EU, public sector bodies need to publish accessibility statements. And results of audits will be part of that statement.
I wonder if this new change in legal requirements means that auditors will earn less money? At the same time it is likely they will also earn more money as there will be more demand due to the regulations.
Would the regulations change anything in your approach?
Would the regulations change anything in your approach?
Not too much. Mostly just to confirm compliance for documentation.
I feel like the most valuable place to seek/publish more detailed reviews would be the 'good but not great' apps - ones that are getting something like 70-90% stuff right already?
- If there are only a few things letting down a generally good performance, then the developers of that app can see a perfect score within their each, if they just fix those few exceptions.
- If apps are really bad, then there's not much point in detailing all their sins - just enough to convincingly steer people clear of them unless/until they improve dramatically.
- (And if they're already perfect, yay for them, but I'm guessing that's not going to happen too often) 🙂
Another consideration might be age and activity level of project; if an app is quite old and established and no longer under active development, then even a few minor niggles might be there to stay - compared to a newer, more active app that's got more things wrong with it now, but which may well move to fix issues more quickly if they're helpfully pointed out to them by a project like this.